


in nobody's eyes but mine

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alpha Rey (Star Wars), Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, F/M, Me? A nonlinear ho? It’s more likely than you’d think, Mpreg, Omega Ben Solo, Sports, discussions of sexism both literal and metaphorical, me a year ago: I HATE MPREG, me now: let’s get ben pregnant folks, more seriously tho:, the olympics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-08-12 04:20:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20157157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: Rey had spent too much of her life feeling as though permanence could only be transient so why bother with it.  What was long-term? What was mating? What was home?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ever-so-reylo (Ever_So_Reylo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ever_So_Reylo/gifts).

> For Ever-So-Reylo, bc at one point we planned to write this together and then went a different route, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since. Granted, it looked quite different when we talked about it.
> 
> Some ideas here came from [an article I read about the USWNT and hormones](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-cup/2019/07/13/revealed-next-frontier-sports-science-usas-secret-weapon-womens/). It was a fascinating article.
> 
> While there won’t be MPreg actively in this fic, they’re trying to get Ben pregnant. I know that can be squicky for people so I’m flagging it up top. I’m playing with gender more than I usually do in ABO apparently. 
> 
> Title comes from “[Andy You’re A Star](https://open.spotify.com/track/3Jm6PDqIputlpeg75EtDic?si=vG4JqWkiQiSPlDSepUbdHw)” by The Killers, which was my high school hypnotic jam.
> 
> Special mega thanks to Jeeno for loving me enough to beta-read this. If it’s any consolation, she came out of it really liking it so if you’ve made it this far you might too.

“You gonna be ok?”

She hears his throat click. She feels his chest expand a little more than it usually does. She smells his anxiety spike.

“I’ll make it through the day,” he says.

She twists. 

She is lying in his arms, her head tucked under his chin. She’s rarely the little spoon, but when he’s this close to his heat, any rubbing against the gland just between his shoulder blades can be too much. There’s something comforting about lying this way, though it had taken a lot of time to get used to. 

Rey had spent too much of her life feeling as though permanence could only be transient so why bother with it. What was long-term? What was mating? What was home?

(27)

_ EXCLUSIVE: Are Rey Johnson and Kylo Ren dating? _

_ Heroes of this past year’s Olympics, Diver Rey Johnson, 22, and swimmer Kylo Ren, 29, have been seen out and about on the town in recent months, despite the fact that Johnson is completing her degree in Ohio and Ren lives in California. _

_ Everyone knows what goes on in the Olympic Village, but Ren is notorious about never engaging even in the more PG activities that go on there. So maybe they’re just friends. _

_ If Alphas and Omegas can be just friends. _

*

He smells so fucking ripe, smells like every strawberry she’s ever wanted to eat, bright and red and juicy on the farmstand table. She wants to bury her face in his neck, lick a stripe down his back, press four fingers into his ass. But she doesn’t. They don’t have time for that right now. He has to be at the pool in an hour and if she starts, she won’t stop until long after his heat is over. 

And today of all days before a heat, she cannot do that.

She can wait a few more hours. Even if her mouth is watering.

Kylo gets up and there’s a damp spot under where he’d been lying—sweat for the most part. He’s too hot right now. The AC is blasting at sixty-five degrees, but he’s sweating as though he’s been sitting in the sun for hours.

“Make sure you hydrate,” Rey tells him as he walks towards the bathroom to shave away what hairs have grown in overnight that might slow him down even a little bit. He turns on the light and she can see slick shining in the crack of his ass. By this evening, it’ll be gushing out of him, and she’ll be lost in him, fucking the bundle of nerves in the pit of her stomach the fuck right out of her. 

He grimaces.

He hates water this close to his heat, which means he sweats too much and doesn’t replenish and ends up with a headache on the third day. 

He hates water this close to his heat, which means he swims faster.

(1)

Rey smells her before she sees her, smells her with her face buried between Paige Tico’s legs. Paige is on the soccer team, and her ass is basically perfect, and she’d been very down for it. This is Rey’s first Olympics, and she’s only ever met one other female Alpha in her entire life which has made it delightfully easy to find women who want to fuck her. Less competition in one of the most competitive spaces on the planet. 

She sees Paige through it. She’s not going to be that rude, stopping with her partner halfway to orgasm, especially since Paige’s cunt is right there, beautiful and swollen and slick. 

But there’s an Omega in the Olympic Village, and she wouldn’t be surprised if every male Alpha in the Village is flexing for her right now and Rey—well, she flexes too.

She brings Paige off, grins up at her, wipes her face and gets dressed in a hurry. 

“You don’t want me to…?” Paige asks her from where she’s lying looking dazed. Rey’s good at it. She has actually made someone have an orgasm so strong she fainted before—a fact she’ll never not be proud of.

“I’m good,” Rey says. She feels a bit like an asshole, but she can’t really think about coming right now, not with the scent of that Omega in her nose. She must be really close to her heat if she smells like that through the door. And besides, her and Paige—it’s just fucking. It’s not like she’s running out on her mate, or even a girl she’s seen more than once. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

She follows the scent down the hallway and towards the pool, where she finds the Omega.

She stands there for a long time, watching him swim. He has arms and legs that go on for days, back muscles that ripple as he butterflies his way up and down the length of the pool, water rolling over a pristine gland in the middle of his back, right between his shoulder blades. 

She’s never seen anyone move like this. 

She’s never smelled anyone like this.

Her hands ball into fists and she has to take deep, deep breaths. Ok. It’s ok. She’s not—she won’t—

He reaches the end of the pool and turns back for another lap and Rey feels hot anger swelling in her chest. _ Notice me, _ she thinks as she stares at him. _ I’m here, Omega. Notice me. _

He doesn’t notice her and it’s when Rey considers diving into the pool and dragging his lips to hers that she turns on her heels and flees.

(15)

The _ Sports Illustrated _cover is incredible, and Rey can’t stop looking at it.

He’s wearing his speedo and all eight of his gold medals, his eyes blazing into the camera. He is unsmiling, but that’s not even a little abnormal. She can’t really imagine him smiling at all.

She flips the magazine open. She’s at the airport and has a good twenty minutes before her flight. She tells herself there’s nothing to it—that he swims and she sort of swims so it’s just reading about the gig. It’s not because he smells perfect, and that one drunken night he’d comforted her and told her she’s not alone. He’s just a guy. 

She frowns as she reads.

It starts off the way any athletic profile does—Kylo’s dominance in the pool, his larger-than-life armspan, his training routine. There are a few lines of interview, too, where he talks about what it’s like swimming for yourself when you’ve got your grandfather’s legacy lurking in the water. 

_ It always gets weird about my body, _ Kylo had told her one night after a few beers. His eyes had been glassy but they’d still burned right into her. _ They pretend they’re not gonna. But literally every profile I get—something about how I am an Omega in an Alpha’s body. No. _ Fuck _ that. It’s my body and I’m not an Alpha. _

He’d been right. Phrases like _ unusually muscular _ and _ taller than any Omega I’ve ever met _ leap out from the page at her. It’s when she gets to _ distracting, unclaimed mating gland _that her hand scrunches the article, ripping it from the staples holding the magazine together and throwing it into the recycling.

She’s breathing heavily.

It’s not the same—not the same as the poking and prodding and tweets, the _is it even FAIR to let her compete if she’s got a physiological edge over Beta women? _It’s not the same because for Kyo—Ben—it’s overcoming the odds, where as for her, somehow, it’s cheating. And yet, it’s exactly the same. It’s everyone assuming that their bodies, rather than their work, define their prowess. Because sure, sure she has a higher metabolism and quicker muscle building than Betas, but that wouldn’t mean _shit_ for her technique—which she’s spent hours on.

She closes the magazine again and looks at Ben’s face on the cover. His eyes are a little bit angry, now that she’s looking. Had this photo been taken before or after the interview? Had someone made a comment about that gland that he _ hates _ that he has to show when he swims? 

_ Have you tried a wetsuit? _ some idiot in the Olympic Village had asked.

_ I shouldn’t have to—they should leave my body a-fucking-lone. _

_ Yeah but we’re all here for them to stare at our bodies. _

_ How would you feel having to compete with your dick out? _

Rey had kept it from devolving into a fistfight, if only barely. 

She swallows and pulls out her phone. She’d gotten Ben’s number. She hadn’t quite known what to do with it. He wasn’t—well he wasn’t like other people she’d gotten numbers from. Somehow she’d known that if she texted him, or called him, it would be like crying into his chest, feeling not so existentially alone in a way that terrified her more than a little. He is the only person she’d ever wanted to fuck who dared her to actually know him first—even if she knows, she _ knows _ he wants her too.

_ That was a fucking bullshit article. The pic is 🔥🔥🔥tho. _

She boards, spends four hours in the air, then lands and when she does, there’s a text from him, waiting.

_ Fucking bullshit. But that’s life. Thanks for the text. _

*

Ben disappears soon after his shave, but the scent of him lingers in the pillows, in the bed. 

She checks her phone because she knows her schedule, knows what time she needs to be suited up today, but she needs to just double check. She has time to watch Ben swim, then go for the gold herself. And then—

Then they’ll be done for this year, and their teams will want them to party, to drink themselves blind. But Ben’s got his appointment at the fertility clinic this afternoon, six little embryos in petrie dishes waiting for insemination, and then his heat mere hours after that.

_ You’re cutting it close, _the doctor had warned them both sternly, but he had also understood in the end.

_ You shouldn’t dive, _ a voice tickles at the edge of her mind. _ You should go with him. Hold his hand. _

But Ben had been adamant that Rey dive, that he could do this on his own, that she’d be there with him after which would be more important because he wouldn’t want to think about it at all, wouldn’t want to breathe anything but her. 

_ You’re not leaving me behind, _Ben had said firmly when they’d been waiting for the cab that would take them back to the Olympic Village after their intake appointment. 

_ I know I’m not. _

_ You’re making me home. _

_ You’re already my home. _Her voice had caught in her throat and Ben had pulled her into his arms and they’d stood there silently. 

(29)

Rey hates social media. She deletes hers not long after the Olympics are over, right around the same time she and Ben start doing whatever it is they’re doing. Because sure, it’s fun to post Fitness Friday videos, or action shots Luke takes of her at the pool, but the second that Kylo Ren is in the picture, all anyone can comment on on her pics is _ him _.

_ Are you two dating? _

_ OMG they’re perfect for one another. You tuck right under his chin. He’s so tall. _

_ Do you fuck in pools? _

_ If you get married and have kids, who will carry the baby???? _

She blocks, she reports, she rolls her eyes until Rose asks her, “Why don’t you just delete your account then? If it makes you so upset? What do you get from it anyway?”

And she’d done it. One deep breath and she’d been free. No dumb comments about her abs, about her ass, about whether or not she’s gonna impregnate everyone’s favorite swimmer. 

She really doesn’t need to think about that last one. Not even a little bit. Because it’s not like she doesn’t jerk off like twice a day thinking about his shoulders and what lies between them. 

(61)

There are tears in her eyes when she bites down.

She’s had some of the finest wines in the world. She’s eaten the most luxurious chocolates. She’s had fruit fresh from farmstands, so ripe the juices are almost too sweet for the tongue.

None of that tastes the way that Ben tastes when the membrane around his mating gland breaks beneath her teeth and the taste of him floods her mouth.

The rest of the world doesn’t exist beyond this, and them, and what they mean for one another, what it means for them to have found one another.

Her heart hammers as she swallows the taste of him down, licks clean the spotting of blood off his back. He’s come hard, his cum pouring out of his dick as his hands tighten on the bedding beneath them. And she—

Well, she’s still coming, an orgasm so all-consuming that she hadn’t even realized it was happening to her until she’d noticed Ben’s twitching dick. Yes, her heart is racing in her clit, her muscles are spasming, her heart is full, her head is light and she can’t let go of him—won’t let go of him.

She might be saying his name right now.

He might be saying hers too.

*

She can smell him through the chlorine, wafting over the water as he paces back and down. He can’t sit right now—he’s too edgy from his hormones. He can’t wrap himself in a towel or wear a sweatshirt right now because the pressure against his gland will probably give him an erection and the last thing he wants to do is get an erection in that fucking banana hammock. As if people don’t fixate on what’s under the speedo all the time (_ Kylo Ren has to pad his speedo. Omegas don’t have dicks _ that _ big _)—he hates the nervousness about what might happen if he does lose control of his body.

He’s got blockers under his nose, and he’s taken his scent suppressants religiously. Rey will be the only Alpha who will be able to smell just how close he is. The others will only know if they get a close enough look at his neck, his wrists, his testicles, his back.

She shifts slightly. She’s getting wet from the smell. Not even the overpowering chlorine in the air can quite suppress the way him smelling this ripe makes her feel. Especially since they’ve fucked in a pool significantly more than once.

She takes deep breaths. _ Calm down. _

She needs to focus. Ben’s heat before he swims—well it improves his performance. Ben’s heat before she dives? Distraction of the highest order. The only thing she can think about is riding him, holding him inside her, filling him with her family. 

She swallows.

Because yeah.

Just yeah.

(79)

It comes up about a year before the Olympics, when he’s sobbing and begging and clutching at the mattress, tossing his head back and forth as she rides him as hard and fast as she can, taking him in as deep as he’ll go. It slips out of his lips, and she doesn’t even really remember it—because who actually remembers anything said during heat?—until two days afterwards when he’s eating breakfast and looking at her nervously over his coffee.

“Do you want kids?”

_ God, give me your babies, Rey. Please. Please please. _

She blinks at him for about thirty seconds, watches as his ears go red but as he refuses to break eye-contact. Because that’s Ben. Stubborn and sticking to his guns to the very fucking end.

“I—” she swallows. Because that’s Rey, biting back tears when uncomfortable truths hit her smack across the face. “I don’t know. Maybe. I—I don’t know.”

He nods and sort of exhales. He finishes breakfast in silence.

“Ben?”

“Yeah?” He’s a little bit breathy, a little bit nervous. She reaches for him and he takes her hand.

“Love you.”

He relaxes at once. “Love you too.”

*

There are tons of people all around and it takes about thirty minutes for the people sitting next to her to realize that _ That’s Rey Johnson! _ They ask to take her picture, which she’s sure will be tweeted out to the masses, and retweeted, and retweeted, and _ there to support her man!! _Which she is. She just is tired of the way people comment on it, as though it’s commentworthy. That’s what you do, right? You go to your person’s thing to support them?

Ben’s been to all of her competitions too.

She swallows.

_ Breathe _.

She’s just getting antsy, just getting angry. She’s got him in her nose and she wants him, wants to drag him off that bench and press him against a wall and tug him loose from that ridiculously tiny black speedo. She wants to feel the weight of him in her hand, feel him bob as he moans, wants to suck on the glands in his neck and make him groan, make him beg, make him need her because she loves the way he needs her. She’s angry that she can smell he needs her and she can’t be close to him.

_ Breathe. _

Onset rut is the worst and always has been. She hates the anger. She hates the way she can’t stay still, can’t stay calm and collected. Anger is for injustice, not because she can’t fuck. Anger is existential, not hormonal. And yet here are her hormones, making her heart pump faster and her nipples stiffen and her cunt begin to blossom.

They begin to announce the races and Rey takes another deep breath as the energy in the room swells to a cheer. 

Everyone is on their feet, waving flags, chanting at the swimmers who are standing. Ben’s hopping up and down a little bit, his hair tucked under his swimcap now. She can tell—even from hundreds of feet away—that he’s looking for her in the crowd.

She puts her thumb and pointer finger between her teeth and whistles. Over the cheers, she doesn’t expect him to hear it—not really.

But he does, his eyes landing on her across the pool and she can see him relax just a moment. _ You’re here. _

_ I’m here. _

(23)

Rey will always regret the first time they fuck. Not that they fuck, or even how good it makes her feel—oh no.

She will always regret that it’s because she’d gotten into a bar fight, fucking lost control, almost beat the shit out of someone who rubbed her the wrong way. She doesn’t do that. She’s not just some angry Alpha, but there’s Ben, grabbing her hand and dragging her away as she spews curses at some guy in a trucker hat. It’s raining outside, and the headlights of the passing car cast light then darkness around them as they walk because Rey’s far too amped up to wait for an Uber. She’s walking faster than she’s walked in her life and suddenly she’s breaking into a run because she can’t not, she can’t fucking not, she has to use her limbs or she’ll scream. She could punch a tree, kick a car, throw herself off a cliff and hit the ground running. She’s sure of it. She is strong. Nothing can hurt her.

Ben keeps up. His legs are fucking long and as every article she’s ever read about him insists on pointing out, he has the lung capacity of six whales. He outpaces her, if only because of his stride, rounds in front of her, grabs her shoulders and she surges up to kiss him. Fuck waiting, fuck this dumb fucking dance they’re doing, this pretending to be friends, pretending that maybe they should date, get to know one another. She’s known him from the first second she’d smelled him with her tongue two inches into Paige Tico—she has to taste him. 

He doesn’t push her away, though later she will wonder why not. He doesn’t bite her tongue when she presses it between his lips. No, he pulls his arms around her, and they stumble away from the side of the road, behind a tree, or a bush, or something, because they’re in the mud now, mud and rain, earth and water as she fumbles for the belt of his pants and he keeps kissing her, every time she pulls her lips away from his, they chase hers until he’s inside her, and then they sort of go _ oh _ against hers and he’s breathing really hard and she smells—something—she’s not sure what. Not fear, not pain, not _ I don’t want this _. She’s not sure. 

“I’ve got you,” she whispers. “You’re safe.”

And he nods and whimpers as she slides along him and god he feels so good—so so so so good.

Rey will regret it because when she climbs off him, and helps him to his feet, they don’t know what to say to one another. This wasn’t planned. This was rut taking over, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go, how they were supposed to be, but there was no taking it back.

If there was no taking it back, she wishes it had been because of almost anything else.

She feels almost ashamed of herself as she takes his hand and slowly they walk back towards the road. 

“Don’t,” Ben says when he catches the expression on her face in the light of the next passing car.

“Don’t what?” Now she smells fear, anxiety. She pauses and pulls on his hand until he’s facing her. She reaches up and touches his face, stands on the tips of her toes to get a better scent of him. 

“I—” Ben cuts himself off, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows back whatever words he was planning on saying. 

Another car passes and Rey sees _ don’t go _ in his eyes.

Which only makes her regret everything more.

She doesn’t want their first time—because oh, oh it is a first time of many she hopes—to be filled with fear. 

So she stands on the tips of her toes, brushes her lips over his glands and immediately the scent changes. Relief—hope. 

“I won’t,” she tells him and stands on the tips of her toes to kiss him.

*

She watches Ben prepare to launch himself into the water. His face is far calmer than she knows he’s feeling right now. She’s sure he’s feeling like everything that’s ever mattered to him in his life is about to fall apart. She can smell it in the air, magnified a hundred-fold because of how close he is to his heat.

She breathes. Her anger spikes.

The whistle blows and Ben’s torpedoed himself forward and she’ll never get over watching him in the water. It’s like he was born to fly, if swimming were flying. It churns around him as his body undulates his way like a sea serpent, like a butterfly, to the other end of the pool.

_ You’ll be out soon, _ she tells his heart which she knows is rioting _ no no no not water not water no it will wash the scent away and then my Alpha won’t find me and then I’ll be alone no no not water _ against his chest. _ I’m here. I’ll find you. I’ll always find you. _

_ I’ll find you and then we’ll make a family. I promise. It’ll be worth it, it’ll be worth it. _

(58)

“It feels a bit like I’m going to die,” he tells her. It’s after nationals, and she’s drawn out his knot and she’s got a plug in his ass. 

“What does?”

“Swimming. When I’m that close. It makes me go faster. Snoke—he—” he swallows. Not for the first time, and not for the last time, she is glad that Ben fired his old coach, the one who had had him schedule his heats to start right after major competitions because it would make him swim faster. 

“So why do you still do it?” she asks him, gentling the question by brushing some of that sweaty dark hair from his forehead. 

“Because I don’t want to lose,” he says. “I can’t lose—not ever. What am I if I’m not _ Kylo Ren _?” He spits the name out as though angry he’d ever adopted it. 

“You’re lots of things,” Rey says.

“Name five.”

She laughs. “That’s a high number.”

“I’m serious. What am I worth if I’m not swimming? What’s my fucking value?”

Rey swallows. Her mind is blank except for one thing, and the one thing isn’t the right answer. Not right now. Not given everything he’s ever said to her about _ needing to be his own man _ and _ proving everyone wrong. _

“Exactly,” he says, misinterpreting her silence.

“No,” she protests at once. “That wasn’t what I—”

“You couldn’t think of anything. It’s fine. I can’t either.”

“I can think of lots of things, but it’s hard when I’m distracted by how much you mean to me, and how you’re the most valuable thing in my life right now. And that’s not just heat hormones.”

He looks at her like he might cry. He looks at her like he might come again. 

“You shouldn’t have to hurt yourself to keep thinking you have value,” she tells him. “That’s fucked, Ben.”

He swallows.

But she can see in his eyes that he’s not going to stop.

*

He wins. 

Because of course he wins.

Thunderous cheers and his arms raised, waving at the crowd, shaking the hands of the other swimmers. Rey’s already making her way through the stands. She could have sat closer, but they hadn’t known when this appointment was going to get scheduled and by the time they’d sorted it out, she’d been too late to claim her family tickets. 

She weaves her way through the crowd towards the entrance to the locker room.

_ Remember to keep it in your pants, _she tells herself firmly. 

She flashes her pass to the security guard, who nods and lets her through, and then she’s in the locker room. Ben’s already there, pacing back and forth.

“Hey,” she tells him and he whirls around. His pupils are so fucking blown right now and his scent is going to start to break through his suppressants. 

“Hi,” he croaks out.

“You did it,” she says, smiling.

“Yeah.”

“Shower,” she tells him.

He flinches. He’d just swum through all that water, he doesn’t want more.

“Shower,” she tells him again. “You don’t want to smell like pool.” _ At the clinic, _she doesn’t say out loud. He swallows twice, then nods, then disappears towards the shower. 

He’s back two minutes later, looking both pale and flushed—sort of blotchy. The glands in his neck are swelling.

“You ok, Solo?” one of his teammates asks, nodding towards his neck. “You’re a bit…”

“A bit under the weather,” he says through gritted teeth. Rey does her best to stand between him and the teammate, who somehow seems not to have noticed the pink and shiny swelling of the gland in the middle of his back. 

“See a medic.”

“That’s where I’m headed,” he says, shrugging into a shirt. He stands facing his locker for a long moment, and Rey can see the way even the lightest touch of the fabric is making his dick start to harden.

“It’s ok,” she murmurs to him, rubbing the small of his back as soothingly as she can, pressing her lips to his shoulder. “Breathe for me.”

“I’m going to make a mess at this clinic, aren’t I?” he mutters to her.

“Might happen,” Rey replies. She continues to rub his back. “I’ll be there as soon as—”

“Yeah,” he says. His throat is clogged. He sounds like he’s going to cry.

Panic floods her. “Ben—”

“I’m fine. It’s just a lot and—” his eyes are bright and his voice drops so low she can barely hear it. 

“Ben,” she says and his lips are on hers, his arms crushing her to his chest. Desperation, fear. 

“Let’s—” she says gesturing towards the door to the locker room. They need a quiet place to talk. She can’t let him feel this afraid. She can’t. She can’t. She knows, scientifically, that happiness and contentedness mean nothing for fertility, but that doesn’t mean that every instinct in her body isn’t flashing warning lights.

“I have to do press,” he says. “I can’t just yet.” 

The other swimmers are bustling. Some of them are talking to their own partners, some of them just have the decency to give Ben a wide berth. 

“You won,” she tells him, cupping his face between her hands. “Today is a good day.”

He takes a slow breath, then another. In and out. “Today is a good day,” he repeats. 

He doesn’t sound like he believes it.

(8)

She should feel gratified by it.

_ Your parents like me. They have taken me under their wings. And you turned your back on them, you fucking traitor. _

He’d chosen Snoke over Luke when he’d chosen swimming over diving. He’d chosen himself and his own ambition over his family. He had a family, and he’d turned his back on it anyway.

But she doesn’t feel gratified.

Oh no, she’s watching as his face sort of goes blank, his eyes go distant and she’s fairly convinced there’s a mild tremble to his lips as he tries not to cry.

She should be thinking _ suck it, asshole. _

Instead, she’s staring at him, wondering if he does have a soul after all.

*

She doesn’t even have time to put him in a cab. Her mind is full of weird medical instruments and Ben’s hands balled into fists as doctors inject the embryos into him. They don’t know how many—if any—will stick, the doctor had been careful to say that. This is all very recent. The use cases are so rare. Usually the female will just carry the children. She has a uterus, after all.

(82)

“It’s not that I don’t want kids,” she’d whispered to him in the dark after about a month. A month of thinking about it, of wondering, of talking about it drunkenly with Finn and trying to understand why she hated the idea, but hated the idea of not doing it even more. “I do. I think. I mean, fuck—I don’t know. What are families? I’m scared of that. But it’s not that I don’t want it, because I do.”

She takes a deep breath. “I just never want to get pregnant.”

She hears him exhale slowly. She hears him inhale. It’s not that she’s afraid to look at him—except that she is. He’s always telling her to face her truths, and so she does, turning onto her side and looking at him.

He looks relieved. 

“I don’t want to lose control of my—”

“You don’t have to explain,” he shrugs. “I’ll do it.”

She swallows. “You’re sure?”

“Not like I’ll be able to swim in the Olympics forever. This means more to me than that.”

_ What’s my fucking value? _

_ Oh. _

“You think this’ll take swimming’s place?” she asks slowly. “That when you’re done swimming, you’ll have a family, and it’ll be all—”

“I want kids,” he says before adding, “I want _ your _ kids. And maybe it’s the fact that my fucking body does this thing twice a year where all I want is to get pregnant, but it does that, and so it doesn’t daunt me. I…” he grimaces. “I’m used to my body just fucking doing things to me.”

She presses her forehead against his chest. He presses his face to her hair. 

*

She’s never more aware of her uterus, not even when she’s getting her period—just for one day thank god, apparently estrogen does not play nicely with alphaglandin in a way that means she only has one day of her uterine lining ripping itself free—than she is as she makes her way to the locker room. Every step is her legs connected to her hips which carry her uterus just above them. 

Female alphas can have kids, though that hasn’t prevented Rey from being on birth control for years. It’s an urban legend that they can’t, a common misconception. It’s not _ easy _ for them to conceive, but they can. Leia will talk and talk about how Ben was a shock, a surprise, a boy she wasn’t expecting after a night of celebration. What Leia never talks about is how there are no other children.

She had gone to the fertility clinic, and Ben had held her hand. They’d given her hormonal injections, they’d extracted eggs from her—all of this had happened. They could have given her more hormonal shots and it could be she on her way to _ in vitro _ right now, not her poor frightened Omega. She could have been brave and done it. 

But she hadn’t.

_ I’m going to be a terrible mother, _ she tells herself before feeling the ghost of Ben’s arms wrap themselves around her as she reaches her locker. _ No, _ it whispers. _ No. You won’t be. _

_ How will I know though? _

She wasn’t going with him now. She was diving instead, going for gold and glory and not for family. Had her parents done that? Is that why they’d left her behind?

(43)

Rey’s mouth goes dry as she watches him pace. 

“I can’t believe you did that,” he growls at her at last. “You know I don’t want to talk to them. You _ know _ it.”

“So then where do we go?” Rey demands. “Because I’m not just going to quit my coach and stop talking to my mentor because I’m fucking you now.”

“You can talk to whoever you want, I just don’t want to have to. And stop trying to play reconciliator. They turned their backs on me long before I turned my back on them, so you can quit fucking projecting.”

“I’m not projecting,” she snarls. “You hate Snoke.”

“I don’t hate Snoke,” he snarls right back.

“Oh yeah? So you like the way he keeps touching your face? And telling you you’re barely more than an overgrown, angry child and—”

And he’s gone. He whirls away from her, and he’s just gone, slamming out of her apartment and off into the night. 

Rey stares at the door. Her eyes are both dry and wet, her mind is blank. There’s a scratch in her throat she can’t quite make go away. Her heart is beating in her ear.

She doesn’t really know when she slides to the floor. She doesn’t know when she starts to cry. 

All she knows is that Ben does come back and finds her there, crumpled and she watches as understanding dawns across his face.

“Hey,” he says and he is on the ground next to her, pulling her into his arms. “Hey. I—hey.”

She presses her face into his neck, breathing him in. _ He came back, _ her heart thunks against her ribs. _ He came back. He came back. _

“Don’t feel bad,” he tells her. “I know you were trying to—” she hears his throat click as he swallows, feels the bobbing of those muscles against her nose. “—to help. I just—it’s not ever going to be easy.”

Rey’s not really listening though. She’s breathing and holding him and he came back.

“Rey?”

Her mind is racing.

Logically, she knows that it shouldn’t affect her this much—that it’s dangerous that it does. They are only barely what they are, it’s all new and fresh. They aren’t mated; they aren’t even in love—are they? She shouldn’t be this devastated when he slams angrily out of her apartment. She shouldn’t be afraid that he won’t come back.

“Hey,” he says again. “Hey, it’s ok. It’s—” and he goes quiet. She can’t form words, and he goes quiet and something shifts in his scent. Then—

“I’m not ever going to leave you like they did,” he whispers. “Not without a word, not without an explanation. I’m not going to. I promise.”

Later, much later, he curls around her while she falls asleep. Her head is on his chest and his heartbeat comforts her like the sweetest lullaby. 

_ I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. _

*

She ends up masturbating quickly in the shower before getting ready. Quick, fast, not actually intense because it’s more about making her cunt pulse and her heart pound than it is about hitting every muscle she didn’t know she had. She needs to get the rage out of her body, needs to get as much of his scent out of her nose right now, needs not to think about him in the cab all by himself, breathing as deeply as he can, trying to calm his hormonal anxiety which is rioting through every fiber of his being right now. And she definitely—definitely—needs not to think about her parents.

It helps—sort of. She no longer feels angry, though she still feels a tension in her muscles that she doesn’t really want there. She tries to stretch it out, tries to follow her own advice and breathe.

“Ready?” Luke asks her. He doesn’t look nervous. He looks proud. She’ll cling to that. 

“No, but it doesn’t matter,” she says the same way she has ever since she started training under him. Ready doesn’t exist in competition. Ready means you’re not hungry for it, and she’s nothing if not hungry for it. 

“You ok?” he asks her, tilting his head, his eyes frowning even if his lips are still smiling.

“Yeah,” she replies breathily. “Just—” 

They’d said they weren’t going to tell anyone, not until they knew. That’s common advice, right? Not to tell people you’re trying for a baby so that they don’t keep asking and if things are not going the way you want you don’t have to keep telling them and making yourself feel worse. Luke and Ben—well, things will never be perfect between them, but they’ve been slowly, carefully improving. 

And as much as she likes Luke, she definitely can’t tell him about the crushing guilt that’s blasting out of nowhere that she had held her ground on not being the one to do it. She hadn’t wanted to carry her child, hadn’t wanted to begrudge it any ill it would cause her, hadn’t wanted to lose control of herself for months on end to carry it within her. She’d had no desire to feel life growing. A child, yes, with Ben’s eyes and her smile, but not born from her womb. Had Leia wanted that?

“Ben’s a hard act to follow,” she says. “And I know everyone will be comparing us.”

Luke’s expression changes, softens. “You’ll wipe the floor with them. You know that, right?”

She can still smell him. When she goes out to the pools, will the chlorine take that smell away?

(63)

It doesn’t really surprise her—that they devote a whole five minutes on _ Sports Center _ to talking about how Ben’s been mated now, and wondering how that will affect his swimming. The commentators keep talking about how the change in hormone patterns might affect his swimming—as though it doesn’t already—how it might affect his muscle growth— _ it’s not going to, assholes. He’s still going to be fluctuating omegaglandin A and B the same way he has since he presented _—what it might mean for the US swim team at the Olympics a year and a half from now.

“That Rey Johnson’s one lucky Alpha,” grins one of them—she can’t remember his name now, but she will always remember that grin. “She’s got quite the trophy husband.”

_ We’re not married and fuck you, I get my own gold medals _, she wants to scream at the television, except she doesn’t. She’s sitting next to Ben, who’s rigid, his own nostrils flaring with rage and—she knows—more than a little humiliation as the editors of the program pull up picture after picture of Ben’s unclaimed mating gland right in the middle of his back as he swims, on the bench.

She turns off the TV. 

Neither of them says a word. They don’t have to. They’ve already said all the words that they could think of about this already. 

Then Ben gets up, grabbing his empty glass of water and going into the kitchen. She hears the faucet running and gets up, follows him in there.

She stands behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her lips to the back of his neck. She wants to say things like she’ll keep him safe, like she’ll protect him. She’s his Alpha, that’s what she’s supposed to do, right? But how can you protect someone from bullshit coming their way from people they’ve never met? How do you soften the blow of something they keep thinking they’re numb to because it’s gone on for so long but they’re not? How do you soften that same blow when it hurts you too?

*

She climbs the ladder up to the diving board, steady steps. Her muscles are warm, her mind is focused. Somewhere across the city, Ben is at a clinic. Easy little procedure, the doctor had promised. No need for a sedative, no need for painkillers. It’ll be over nice and quick and then th heightened fertility surrounding his heat will—hopefully—do its work. 

_ But what if it doesn’t? _They had chosen to do it now—despite the difficulties of scheduling around the Olympics because then they wouldn’t need to manipulate his hormones the way they had had to when they’d extracted her eggs from her. But no—away with those thoughts. Just Rey and the water now. The thousands of people staring at her—they don’t exist.

It’s just her and the steady waves below and the scent of chlorine battling the memory of Ben and strawberries.

The board bounces a little under her weight as she waits for the whistle. 

She’s waits. And waits. 

Waiting for the whistle is the good kind of waiting. The kind she knows will end, and she’ll be able to leap and throw herself through the air. She hates waiting for the most part because you never know when it’s going to end. But today, the waits are short. Soon she’ll be done diving.

Soon she’ll be back in her room with Ben.

And then they’ll have to wait and see if any of the embryos implanted.

Another interminable wait.

The whistle blows—and Rey leaps and twists, every movement perfect and precise and then the sudden, overpowering sensation of water pressing around her completely.

(26)

The first time she’s in control for it—oh—oh there’s nothing like it.

Ben is a mess, the bed is wet underneath him from all the slick and sweat. His skin is feverish and the words coming out of his lips don’t make sense. 

“Alpha I—” 

“More—” 

Sometimes it is little more than an incoherent whine as Rey slides along him, carrying him to yet another orgasm.

His body is divine, the way it undulates underneath her, the way his abdominal muscles—so toned from all that swimming—flex and unflex, the way his chest rises and falls as he pants and groans.

She bends forward, the tips of her nipples brushing against his chest, and she presses her face into those swollen neck glands of his. _ Mine _ , she thinks, though he’s not. _ Let me fill you _, though with what she doesn’t know.

All she knows is that there’s something about the way that she’s kissing him, the way she’s licking at his lips, at his neck, sucking his sweat off his skin. 

She can’t remember what the air tasted like before Ben.

*

Ben broke a world record earlier that day by a full two seconds. 

And Rey matches an all-time high score in the category, a gold medal around her neck as she smiles up at the crowd.

People are waving flags at her, chanting her name, and it feels right, it feels good. She’s really fucking good at this, after all.

Except Ben’s not there, beaming at her with pride the way he was at nationals last year, his back newly hers and his eyes promising her something she didn’t know how to understand.

Ben’s at the clinic, or on his way back to the hotel. And she’s still got press to do, and interviews if the sportscasters can even be fucked to care about her as much as they cared about Ben. 

And of course the one time that she doesn’t actually want them to fawn over her, the one time she wants to get back get away, find him, hold him, ease him through it because she knows he’s as close to the thick of it as it’s possible to get, if he’s not already there. 

But she smiles into the microphone being held to her face because that’s all she can do. She has to keep smiling or else they’ll think she’s ungrateful—and it’s not that she’s ungrateful, it’s that Ben’s waiting for her, and he’d been so distressed and he might be full of embryos now and what if they don’t take hold because he’s distressed?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter will be both shorter and significantly pornier so you have that to look forward to if you got this far!


	2. Chapter 2

_ In a cab,  _ she texts him the moment she’s free, her hair still tied up, her makeup—makeup—still done from before her dive. He hasn’t texted her but she hasn’t necessarily expected it. When he’s this close, sometimes he needs to put all his energy into one foot in front of the other, and even taking his phone out of his pocket might make all the difference in the way that his pants brush at his skin and then he ends up with an erection.

But on the off chance he’s already at the hotel, or in transit, or something, she just needs him to know she’s coming to him, she won’t leave him like this.

He doesn’t reply, but she smells the vestiges of him in the lobby of the hotel before she’s even gotten to the elevator. His scent has seeped—in the briefest moments that he’d been there—into the rugs underfoot. 

The ride up to the fifteenth floor is interminable and the second the elevator door dings open she’s flying down the hallway as fast as she can, her muscles still warm from her prep before her diving. Every step she takes she can smell him more strongly, smell him in that nest of a room that’s full of towels they’d told housekeeping not to clean up and blankets—extra blankets because Rey gets cold from all the air conditioning and they’ll want to soak up his scent during the heat. 

She fumbles with the keycard in the lock, her hands trembling. He’s there, just on the other side of the door, waiting for her and when at last the door opens she almost trips over her own feet in her need to get through the door, get to him.

He’s lying on the bed, half dressed, his cock in his hand, his face a mess of tears as he grips himself.

“Ben,” she groans as she tugs her blue tracksuit pants down her legs and doesn’t even bother taking off the rest as she straddles him and pulls him into her. He chokes out a sob, chokes out a sigh as he sheathes himself in her and she guides him up to a sitting position and he buries his face in her neck, breathing her in. Her hands rest between his shoulder blades, right along his mating gland over the back of his shirt and he chokes and comes as she strokes it lightly—lighter than a feather, lighter than a bubble on the surface of the water.

“I’m here,” she tells him. “I’m here. I’m here.” A chant, a prayer, a promise. She’s here. 

Ben keeps nuzzling his face into her neck, his lips worrying at her own gland as he chokes his way through his orgasm. Then he starts to move again, lifting his hips up underneath her. His whimpers get a little deeper, a little heavier and she knows he’s stopped crying now. Now the edge has been taken off and she can ride him hard if she likes.

And she does like.

They’re in their own little world right now, when they smell like this. There’s no scent of chlorine, no scent of doctor’s office—just him and her, the heat rolling off his back, the rut rolling out of her cunt. The only music in the world is the sound of their sighs as she pushes him back down and tugs her shirt—at last—over her head and then fiddles with the buttons of his so she can pull it off him. 

Instead of throwing it somewhere—the bed, the floor—she pulls it to her face and inhales deeply as she grinds her hips against his. This is what heaven smells like—Ben when he’s like this. Home and heat and love and need and want and trust and balance gone off balance so that it all overpowers her and she can lose her fucking mind for more than four seconds. It’s the smell of his hands at her breasts, his lips on her neck, her clit throbbing at any contact it can get from him. This is the smell of elation.

“Please,” he whispers up at her, and she hadn’t realized she’d slowed. He’s looking up at her, his hands limply on the bed and Rey bends her lips down to his. Then she presses his shirt against his face so he can smell himself while she makes him writhe, makes him rub his back against the bed so it’ll smell like his shirt and there it is—a little time and a little care and she’ll draw the knot right out of him, fasten him inside her while his heart and mind go still and she—

Well, she sits back, toying at her clit until she’s come twice in quick succession, until she’s ready for just a pause, just a respite that lets her collapse under his chest while he keeps coming inside her.

She nibbles at the swollen glands in his neck and he turns his head to kiss her, long and deep. He is satiated for the time being.

“Can I do stuff to your ass?” she asks him.

He shakes his head. 

“Like, maybe surface stuff around the sphincter but not anything penetrative for the next two days.”

She nods and licks at his neck again. “Will you be ok with that?” He’s usually begging for a plug, for the in-and-out pressure and friction of a strap-on by a few hours in.

“I’ll have to be,” he says. 

She lifts her head and drags her lips along the tear stains—now dry, now mixing with sweat. 

“Tell me about it,” she tells him, and he takes a deep shuddering breath.

“They were nice,” he says. “They got it. How close I was, and they knew it was going to be intense.” He takes a deep breath before continuing. “It was pretty fast. They injected a low dosage muscle relaxer which—honestly they probably didn’t need I’m  _ very _ loose right now—and they didn’t need to lube they just…” He takes a deep breath. “Yeah. It was just a quick thing, and then they made me lie still for thirty minutes to make sure things set and then sent me on my way. Not hard.”

But the way he says it makes it sound like it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Like he’d been scared, like he was putting on a brave face.

“I should have been there,” Rey whispers.

“No,” he says firmly. “You didn’t need to.”

“You were there when they took my eggs out,” she points out.

“That’s not the same. You were having surgery. You wouldn’t have been able to get yourself home.”

“Yes, but you would have been there anyway.”

His silence is all the agreement she needs. She presses a kiss to his neck and he swallows. “This is just…” He waves a hand by her ear and swallows and presses his lips to her hair. “I don’t know—I’ve never thought I’d actually come out of a heat pregnant. Sort of makes it hard to think about anything else, and it’s sort of terrifying that I might—”

“You will,” she growls.

“—not.”

“You will,” she repeats determinedly, propping herself up on her arms and looking down at him sternly. “You hear me?”

“Yes, Alpha,” he replies, and his eyes blaze up at her.  _ I will, Alpha _ , his eyes say and any lingering shadow of doubt fades. She bends her lips to kiss him, long and slow because she can’t make him do, make him feel anything until his knot releases a little. 

“You break world records,” she tells his lips. “You swim faster than anyone. Your body is pristine, it’s perfect. It can do this. It will.”

“Yes, Alpha,” he moans, his eyelids fluttering shut at the praise. She feels his cock twitch inside her. 

“You like that?” she whispers, knowing he does. “You like being told that you’re a wonder?”

“Please, Alpha,” he moans and he’s trying to push deeper into her.

“Gold medalist,” she says, and his head tilts back in sheer bliss, his lips parted, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “World record setter. And the perfect Omega. I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t found you. You make me so happy.”

And even if, technically, he’s mid-orgasm, it strengthens. She can tell from the way he’s thrashing a bit and the way that his knot throbs inside her, swelling more, stretching her so deliciously. 

“I love you,” he groans, pulling her back down to his chest. “I love you, Rey.”

“I’m here,” she promises because she hears the whimper underneath it. “I’m here. I love you. We’re going to start a family. You’re going to have my child.”

And it’s not just heat talk this time, not just that Alpha hind-brain that’s telling her that these are the words to say that will express that need to ride him until he can’t breathe. No, these are the words that hit her as she lies there on top of him. This is her Omega, and he’s going to have her child. They’re going to bring a creature into the world who will be so loved, so wanted, so cared for, and it sort of takes her breath away.

If this is possible, what can’t they do? Who can’t they be?

His knot fades and Rey begins to rock her hips again. She reaches her hands back and draws his knees wide before reaching behind her and tracing a circle around his asshole. And then—because he’s not quite writhing just yet, she slides off his dick.

“Roll over,” she whispers to him and he obeys without question, his dick bobbing in the air above the blankets. She runs her hands over the sculpted muscles of his ass, massaging them before bending her head and pressing her lips to the skin between them, licking a stripe of slick away from the crevice before kissing the puckered hole in the middle. She licks a circle around it, not probing inside, and she feels him clench around nothing. One of her hands finds his bobbing dick and she pumps it once lazily. He drips precum onto the bed. His slick has made a wet bullseye right in the center of all the nice hotel sheets with their ridiculously high thread count. What’s a little cum to add to the mix? 

She wants to press her face in it, so she scoots her rear back and leans forward and does, feeling his dick bobbing against her hair, his balls brushing against her shoulder blades. He leaks a little more into her, and she smiles. Yes. Yes, let him coat her. He is her home, why shouldn’t he coat her? 

And why shouldn’t she coat him?

She pulls herself back out from between his legs. She licks her way up from his ass to his spine, inching closer and closer and feeling his breath get shakier with anticipation of her lips connecting with his mating gland.

If she could bottle this and drink it on lonely nights, she would. If she could wear it as perfume, she would. She presses her face in it, his sweat, his hormones—him—and pushes his chest gently down on the bed. She straddles his back—wider than his hips as his ribs extend outwards towards his shoulders, and she rubs her cunt against it.

Ben chokes out something and she can smell more than feel the way he comes on the bed, smell the slick slipping down his legs, the cum dripping onto the bed. She can smell the way he feels because she feels it too in the way her cunt rides the soft ridge of that swollen bump. It’s not enough to make her come—not even close. But he’ll smell like her until the smell of everything else overpowers it. He smells like the night she claimed him, like the night she’d bitten him and licked at him and he’d wept and come and god and held her close to her, nesting her in his arms as they’d both drifted into sweet oblivion.

“Rey,” he chokes into the pillows. “Rey—Rey—I—”

She slides off him and lies on her back and he buries his head between her breasts, his hands finding hers and just holding them as they lie in his wet. 

“I like smelling like you,” he whispers after a long while.

“I like smelling like you too,” she replies.  _ Our child will smell like us both.  _ “Now fuck me the way you want to.”

And he does.

Oh he does. 

He rolls them both onto their sides and hitches her leg up so high it’s resting against his shoulder as he slides into her, rocking his hips desperately into hers. Because she can—entirely because she can—she pulls herself closer to him, the heel of her foot rubbing across his back, circling closer and closer towards his gland until he’s gasping and sighing and coming again.

He comes so quickly in heat—so, so easily. Not that it takes him forever outside of heat, but he has stamina, breath control—really any sort of control. All self-control is short-lived in heat and he’s rolled her onto her back as he spurts more cum into her. For the most part, it will seep down her legs when he pulls out, but some of it she knows is making its way through her cervix, into her uterus. It won’t matter in the long run—she won’t be the one who ends up pregnant from all this. 

Her hands drift to his ass and she rubs the muscles there—gluteus maximus and medius, digging her thumbs into them and he hisses and sighs into her ear. 

“Feel good?” she murmurs to him.

“Yes,” he replies. “You’re too good to me, Alpha.”

“You swam so well,” she says. They aren’t tense the way they usually are during heat. The relaxers they gave him at the clinic probably helped some. But he snuggles his face down into her neck once again and hums contentedly as she rubs. 

Once, a lifetime ago it seems, he worried about crushing her, lying on her like this. It’s not that she’s weak, or small, but he’s bigger and wider and not exactly feather-light.  _ It feels safe,  _ she had told him.  _ Having you on top of me like this. I feel safe. Protected.  _ Wanted, she had not needed to say. She did not need to drive that point home to him. He had known that then and he knows that now even as he presses her further into the mattress with his nuzzling, even as her ribs strain to expand enough for breath. She’ll take it, the pressure of him on top of her like this if it means she’s not alone.

And she’s not alone.

So very not alone. 

*

Peace in heats never lasts long. It can’t, fundamentally. That’s not what they’re for. And it’s not long before Ben is groaning, begging, thrashing on the bed as she rides him. He does beg for something—anything in his ass—and Rey does everything she can to stimulate the surface without penetrating. She does her best to distract him by sucking on his balls, his mating gland, his neck. She keeps his cock occupied at all times, but she knows it’s not the same. Orgasm after orgasm after orgasm and it’s not enough. Pleasure that would once have lain waste to him, would have had him smiling and his head clear—they only take the edge off. 

He clings to her as though afraid she’ll leave, which he’s never done in a heat before and no matter what Rey says to soothe him, to promise that she’s here, that she’s staying, that she loves him, that he’s being so, so good, it is like keeping a storm at bay, rather than helping it blow itself out.

She rolls him onto his back and fucks him as hard as she can. She licks every inch of him, she holds him close, she whispers words she means but only usually thinks about his heart, his body, his scent, his cock, his love, but he’s shuddering and shaking and nothing is enough. Nothing she does is enough.

But that has never stopped her before, and it won’t stop her now. She’s what he has and she won’t fail him. She coos at him as he shudders and cries, she holds him as close as she can so that he can feel her heartbeat when her words can’t reach him through the hormonal haze, she tilts careful sips of water across his lips to keep him hydrated because she knows him well enough to know if he’s kept himself as much away from water as he can, he hasn’t drunk anything in over a day.

And she rides him. Rides him rides him rides him. Sweat drips down between her breasts, down her back and neck. She fucks him until her legs and arms are aching, until she can barely keep herself up and then she keeps on fucking him because she can’t stop, because when he smells like this, when he feels like this, what are aching muscles compared to the need in her groin and stomach?

She spends a good hour licking his mating gland and jerking him off, feeling it pulse under her lips in time with his throbbing cock. “I love you,” she whispers to him as she had the night she’d bitten him. “I love you so much, Ben. I love you.” 

Because she does. She does and nothing matters except the two of them and how they make themselves feel.

*

He cools faster than he usually does. A day and a half of little sleep and the bed is squelching underneath them when Ben lets out a long snore that she knows means he’s fallen into the sort of deep sleep that heralds the end of his usually three day heats. Rey presses her face to his neck. The scent is diluting, weakening. His cock is limp for the first time in hours. He doesn’t look fevered.

He looks so very beautiful.

Gently, she presses her face to his chest, then sniffs her way down his torso to his hips where she spreads his legs slightly—just enough. She sniffs.

Yes—it smells different. Still Ben, still very much Ben, but something else too. A little bit like he’d smelled when she’d rubbed her cunt over his mating gland—except less—less like that. 

Less like that and more like home.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! You can find me [here](https://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)!


End file.
